UN human rights chief calls for probe into Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen

The UN’s human rights chief has called for urgent investigation into Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes against civilians in Yemen.

Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein made the remarks during a Monday speech to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva after the global body attributed over 5,000 civilian deaths to Saudi Arabian airstrikes.

“The minimal efforts made toward accountability over the past year are insufficient to respond to the gravity of the continuing and daily violations involved in this conflict,” he said.

In the same context, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has denounced the air raids conducted by Saudi Arabia and its allies in Yemen as “war crimes,” calling on the United Nations to launch an investigation into the fatal strikes.

The rights organization cited on Tuesday five “apparently unlawful” Saudi aerial assaults in Yemen between June 9 and August 4, which killed 39 civilians, among them 26 children.

“The Saudi-led coalition’s repeated promises to conduct its airstrikes lawfully are not sparing Yemeni children from unlawful attacks,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director at HRW, adding that the attacks “are still wiping out entire families” in Yemen.